Abstract
Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is the fundamental of secure digital communications. It provides a secure means to authenticate identities over the Internet. Symmetric or asymmetric encryption schemes are widely used in identity authentication in any kind of PKI. The conventional PKI has several drawbacks due to the centralized and non-transparent design. Several recent research works utilize blockchain technology to overcome the limitations of conventional implementations of PKI. Blockchain-based PKI integrates blockchain technology with PKI to form a new type of decentralized PKI (DPKI). Several works utilize the currency property in blockchains to implement the reward-and-punishment mechanism. In this paper, we propose a smart contract-based PKI which utilizes the Ethereum smart contract to build a new type of blockchain-based PKI with the reward-and-punishment mechanism using ERC-20 tokens. It has several advantages over previous implementations of similar research that use Ethereum’s main currency—Ether.
Highlights
Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is the fundamental of secure digital communications
We introduce ETHERST, a new blockchain-based PKI which makes use of the currency property of blockchain to integrate incentivization and disincentivization
The introduction of the ERC-20 token in ETHERST resolves the issues of previous implementations of reward-and-punishment mechanism that are using Ether by reducing the reliance on Ether which fluctuates in value with market price
Summary
Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is the fundamental of secure digital communications. It provides a secure means to authenticate identities over the Internet. We propose a smart contract-based PKI which utilizes the Ethereum smart contract to build a new type of blockchain-based PKI with the reward-and-punishment mechanism using ERC-20 tokens. It has several advantages over previous implementations of similar research that use Ethereum’s main currency—Ether. We proposed a new blockchain-based PKI with smart contracts and a custom currency to improve the reward-and-punishment mechanism With this improvement, we believe it will encourage the commercial adoption of the blockchain-based PKI. Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations
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